News Archive 2009

Early in the fall of 2008, students began gathering before a raised platform of fake grass. The artificial turf was adorned with evenly spaced tomato plants, nestled in sensible terra cotta pots. And while the small cluster of plants and grow lamps might have seemed incongruous under other circumstances, this was a garden with a twist: instead of being horticulturalists, the humans were there...

CSAIL Professor Scott Aaronson has just secured a coveted Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship for the year 2009. The fellowships are intended to support promising young faculty as they embark on their research and academic careers.

A trio of CSAIL PIs has been hailed for their work in each of their respective fields. Jonathan Kelner, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, received an NSF CAREER award in January. The award is a way of recognizing junior faculty likely to become leaders in the future.
Professor Tom Knight was recently nominated by the Institute of Engineering and Technology as one of their top 25 most...

CSAIL Professor Madhu Sudan is thinking about communication. His project posits that communication is possible between beings with no common bond of language or shared history. Its direct substantiating case examines a theoretical instance of the third kind, placing extraterrestrials and their instruments in contact with humans and their computers in a quest for understanding. The...

The field of robotics began relatively modestly. Its founders attempted to create simple machines capable of performing tasks or interacting with the world. But in doing so, the first roboticists opened the door to an amazing area of study, rich with possibilities for extraordinary contributions to the greater good.
By exploring the burgeoning field of agile robotics, CSAIL researchers are taking...

Four CSAIL Principal Investigators have been elected Fellows of the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery. That four of this year's forty-four new members came from one lab is a testament to the lab's continuing excellence in the field.
The new members are:
- Hari Balakrishnan, for contributions to computer networking and distributed systems

A group of researchers headed by CSAIL Professor David Karger has just released a program which may help organize the ephemera of our messy daily lives. List.it, a new information capture tool, tries to efficiently serve the purpose of all the tools we use – and misuse – to create a kind of sprawling paper trail of memory.
Information scraps, until now corralled in notebooks, emails to oneself,...